Rocky Ford cantaloupes on sale at a King Soopers supermarket. Cantaloupe growers are following strict safety procedures after a 2011 listeria outbreak in Colorado. (Stephen Mitchell, The Denver Post)

By Unoma AkamagwunaGuest Commentary

As a physician in Aurora training to care for children with injuries or illnesses that impact their ability to move, I am used to helping my patients recover from all sorts of ailments; spinal cord injury, cancer, and neurologic disorders. However, I was surprised to learn about another extraordinarily common health threat that may bring patients to my hospital: food-borne illness.

I learned this firsthand when I cared for a patient who, after falling ill with a food-borne infection, developed pockets of infection in his brain that required a prolonged hospital course to treat. After he finally recovered from his infection, the patient’s muscles were weakened and he required several additional weeks in the hospital under my team’s care to do things like relearn how to walk, get dressed, bathe and eat. Not only did my patient suffer debilitating illness as a result of his food-borne infection, his hospital stay was painful, costly, and importantly, preventable.

Unfortunately, one in six Americans each year is affected by a food-borne illness, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Children are not spared from this threat: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FoodNet surveillance system indicate that rates of many food-borne infections are highest in children younger than 5 years old.Read more…

Shortages of a generic chemotherapy drug almost certainly led to relapses among young people suffering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to a new study.

It’s a troubling sign of the havoc that drug shortages can wreak upon the health of patients.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine led by a doctor from the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital looked at relapse rates among Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients who took the preferred generic drug, called mechlorethamine, and a substitute used when the first choice wasn’t available.

Admittedly, it was a small sample insofar as medical research is concerned — just a couple of hundred patients — but the findings showed a 12 percent relapse rate in 2010 among those taking the preferred drug, and a 25 percent rate among those forced to use a substitute.

Drug shortages have been an ongoing problem, to be sure, especially where low-profit generics are concerned.

Last summer, federal lawmakers passed a bill that gives the Food and Drug Administration more power to alleviate cancer drug shortages. A key provision requires drug makers to notify the FDA when they see a shortage coming.

Such notifications allow the FDA to work on increasing foreign imports of certain drugs and notifying other manufacturers who can increase production.

The report showing higher relapse rates among those who did not receive a preferred cancer fighting drug shows the importance of such measures and underscores why the government must remain vigilant about keeping track of such matters.

Hamilton apparently didn’t like some of the things Armstrong allegedly said – “aggressive and intimidating,” is how his lawyer characterized the champion’s comments – but usually you report that kind of behavior to the police. Why bring the FBI into it?

You bring the FBI into it because, of course, federal agents for the Food and Drug Administration are spending heaven-knows-how-much time and money investigating whether Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs while winning the Tour.

You might think that the job of policing the integrity of a race in France is the business of, well, France – or the International Cycling Union – but apparently the FDA has nothing better for its investigators to do.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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To reach the Denver Post editorial page by phone: 303-954-1331

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